Talk:African Americans

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Previous discussions concerning the infobox in the top right corner of the article can be found at Talk:African Americans/summary.

Semi-protected edit request on 23 July 2024

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I request for where It says "African Americans constitute the third largest racial or ethnic group in the U.S after White Americans and Hispanic and Latino Americans" to be changed to "African Americans constitute the third largest racial or ethnic group in the U.S after European Americans and Hispanic and Latino Americans" because if Black Americans are called "African Americans" then White Americans should be called "European Americans". Can you please make that edit, thank you. 81.137.207.239 (talk) 13:18, 23 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not done: Wikipedia follows the terms used by reliable sources, and the citation on this line does not contain the word European. European American is not a commonly-used term in this context, so we should stick to terms that more people will understand. Jamedeus (talk) 01:01, 24 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-protected edit request on 2 September 2024

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Where it says "Most African Americans", it should say "Some" African Americans... 83.255.180.32 (talk) 20:50, 2 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not done "Most" is obviously correct. Rsk6400 (talk) 06:34, 3 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Semi-protected edit request on 29 September 2024

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Hispanic or Latino group is 18.7% while African-Americans or Blacks are 12.1% according to the 2020 census. 96.246.86.51 (talk) 03:49, 29 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

African-Americans or Blacks as the 2nd largest ethnic group in the U.S. is categorically and emphatically incorrect. Please correct.

Not done: I understand your confusion, however African-Americans are a specific, singular ethno-racial group as measured by the US census, whereas "Hispanic or Latino" is an umbrella category used to measure a multiplicity of ethnicities and races that fall under it. I hope this clears some things up. Glass Snow (talk) 09:01, 29 September 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Last sentence of lede (again)

The end of the lede currently reads:

The term "African American" generally denotes descendants of Africans enslaved in the United States.^[1]^[2]

There was previously a citation to a source from Martin & Fabes that specified that African-Americans had to be descendants of people enslaved specifically within the United States, but I WP:BOLDly removed that source as Martin & Fabes is an introductory child development textbook, and neither of the authors claim to be experts in racial identity or anything remotely related to being a reliable source for the term "African American" (both are white psychologists, one specialized in gender identity, the other in children's relationships). I moved up another source from later in the article that talks about the introduction of the phrase, but neither it nor the remaining Locke and Bailey source specify that the ancestors have to have been enslaved within the United States. Therefore, I am proposing changing the sentence to:

The term "African American" generally denotes American descendants of those taken from Africa as part of the Atlantic slave trade.^[1]^[2]

Since this sentence has been the subject of a few discussions here in the past, I wanted to bring this to the talk page first.

References

^ ^a ^b Locke, Don C.; Bailey, Deryl F. (2013). Increasing Multicultural Understanding. SAGE Publications. p. 106. ISBN 978-1483314211. Archived from the original on August 18, 2018. Retrieved March 7, 2018. African American refers to descendants of enslaved Black people who are from the United States. The reason we use an entire continent (Africa) instead of a country (e.g., Irish American) is because slave masters purposefully obliterated tribal ancestry, language, and family units in order to destroy the spirit of the people they enslaved, thereby making it impossible for their descendants to trace their history prior to being born into slavery.
^ ^a ^b Wilkerson, Isabel (January 31, 1989). "'African-American' Favored By Many of America's Blacks". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved December 28, 2020. A movement led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson to call blacks African-Americans has met with both rousing approval and deep-seated skepticism in a debate that is coming to symbolize the role and history of blacks in this country. ... The question of a name has caused pain and controversy since the first Africans were captured and shipped to the Americas in the 17th century. The slaves called themselves Africans at first, but slave masters gave them English names and called them Negroes, the Portuguese word for black, historians say. That term was resented by some blacks who said it was degrading when whites mispronounced it, accidentally or intentionally.

--Ahecht (TALK
PAGE) 15:30, 1 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

[Locke-1] Locke, Don C.; Bailey, Deryl F. (2013). Increasing Multicultural Understanding. SAGE Publications. p. 106. ISBN 978-1483314211. Archived from the original on August 18, 2018. Retrieved March 7, 2018. African American refers to descendants of enslaved Black people who are from the United States. The reason we use an entire continent (Africa) instead of a country (e.g., Irish American) is because slave masters purposefully obliterated tribal ancestry, language, and family units in order to destroy the spirit of the people they enslaved, thereby making it impossible for their descendants to trace their history prior to being born into slavery.

[wilkersonnyt-2] Wilkerson, Isabel (January 31, 1989). "'African-American' Favored By Many of America's Blacks". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved December 28, 2020. A movement led by the Rev. Jesse Jackson to call blacks African-Americans has met with both rousing approval and deep-seated skepticism in a debate that is coming to symbolize the role and history of blacks in this country. ... The question of a name has caused pain and controversy since the first Africans were captured and shipped to the Americas in the 17th century. The slaves called themselves Africans at first, but slave masters gave them English names and called them Negroes, the Portuguese word for black, historians say. That term was resented by some blacks who said it was degrading when whites mispronounced it, accidentally or intentionally.

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